All the Easter Eggs and Connections You Missed in ‘Cloverfield,’ 10 Years Later

10 years ago today, on January 18, 2008, audiences sat down for a monster movie unlike any other. In Cloverfield, director Matt Reeves combined the frantic, jittery aesthetic of found footage horror movies with the heart-racing tension of monster disaster epics like King Kong and Godzilla. What resulted was something as thrilling as it was terrifying. But the 2008 Bad Robot movie was also innovative off-screen; Cloverfield had risky, atypical marketing, with the first surprise teaser dropping in front of Transformers in 2007 out of the blue, and without so much as the movie’s title. Then an intricate viral marketing campaign leading up to release gave fans more backstory and details; pure catnip for conspiracy theorists and Easter egg lovers.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw the monster movie in the theater, mostly because it wasn’t exactly a good experience. As much as I liked the movie, I hated the found footage style at the time and was so nauseous from Cloverfield‘s shaky cam I had to put my head down for long chunks of time so I didn’t end up blowing chunks. But growing more accustomed to that style over the years, I’ve revisited Cloverfield multiple times, and I love it more with every viewing. It still holds up as a genuinely scary monster movie, one laced with panic and emotion (I swear I didn’t start crying the last time I rewatched it), and most notably, one that never gives away too much. Much like its fantastic “blood relative” / sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane, the sci-fi elements remains a mystery while the focus stays on the more relatable narrative of human survival. But if you rifled through either film’s viral marketing campaigns at the time, comprised of fake websites, phony news broadcasts, and secret messages, you would’ve learned a lot more about the Clover-verse.

In honor of the original film’s 10th anniversary, we’ve dug up all the Easter eggs and hidden connections in both Cloverfield,10 Cloverfield Lane, and their respective augmented reality games that you may have missed the first time around. Some of these are fairly obvious, like the famous J.J. Abrams Easter eggs buried across all his Bad Robot productions, but others are so brief and subliminal, you’d have to seek them out to find them. From hidden homages to classic monster movies, secret password-protected websites, connections to LOST and Star Trek, and one chilling piece of static audio, the Clover-verse is packed with fun reveals. Here are all the connections you missed in Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane, with many spoilers, of course. Stay tuned for when the third film, God Particle, hits theaters April 20 (hopefully) and reveals more connections.